Changing business processes, and the technologies supporting it all, isn't easy no matter if you're the mom-and-pop online retailer thirsty for more database capabilities or a huge state-owned telecom facing the ugly reality of market deregulation.

That latter scenario is what a Poland-based, state-own telecommunications provider faced a few years ago. Choices for customers would mean potential business loss to the tune of millions, so IT leadership knew it needed a more robust customer relationship management (CRM) and database system to drive new customer service efforts and for keeping its market share.

But the aspect of revamping infrastructure was daunting, to put mildly, given it had 28,000 employees, 11 million customers and was adding 600,000 new subscribers (and all data related to customer and account information) to its systems every year.

At the time business processes were still done in a manual, paper-drive approach which not only led to customer dissatisfaction but long order and subscriber cycle times as the decentralized business model proved cumbersome for responsive customer interaction.

The company was barely able to keep up with just the essential business data much less using captured data to develop new services and for determining what was working with customers and what wasn't.

It was time to move to Web-based services and rebuild the customer care center platform to gain efficiencies, but also allow the company gain greater competitiveness.

The telecom chose to go with a Web-based Oracle PeopleSoft CRM that let it integrate legacy systems by consolidating hundreds of small regional offices into one centralized, call-center environment. That sliced customer-service and IT-administration costs and increased customer responsiveness-- service is available now 24x7, which was not previously possible, with the average time to answer a customer call at 30 seconds compared to minutes and hours before.

The company went with an IBM MQSeries and IBM MQSeries Integrator software system that worked with legacy billing and network inventory management systems. All billing and provisioning information is presented through a single interface, which maximizes efficiency and reduces response times dramatically.

It took seven months to train staff and get the kinks out, but once completed and now that deregulation is in effect, the telecom has managed to keep 90 percent of its former market share.

Not a bad return on the Oracle investment.